You were born in Denver, but when you were a teenager, your family moved to Idaho. What brought you to Aspen?
During my freshman year of college my mom got divorced and that’s when we decided to move back to Colorado. My sister was already here, so this was kind of our first stop back to Colorado. When we got to Aspen I was like, “Holy shit, the ski lifts come right down into town! I really like this place.” And then it seemed like the ratio of pretty girls was just through the roof. So it was an attractive proposition for a 19-year-old college freshman. After college, I came home for a summer and never left.

Except for the brief time after college when you moved to Alaska.
That was the summer of 1984. For seven weeks I worked on a floating barge in the Bering Strait that processed salmon. Then I spent the rest of the summer exploring Alaska, from Denali National Park to the Kenai Peninsula on down to Homer. When I was in Anchorage, I met a friend of my dad’s who carved totem poles. I took some photos of his carvings and told him, “You should move to Aspen. You’d make a killing there with these.” He said, “If I move anywhere, I’m moving to Fairbanks.”

But you moved back to Aspen. What was Aspen like in the 1980s?
It was a little bit different back then. I heard stories about how great it was before I got there, but I feel pretty lucky that I got to experience it when I did. I was living in this sweet condo in town and working as the banquets manager at the Snowmass Club. I didn’t really like managing people, and a friend of mine who was caretaking a cabin up in Little Annie Basin was moving to Ashcroft and asked me if I wanted to take over the cabin. And I was like, “Well how much is rent?” And he said it was $100 a month—even back then that was a pretty sweet deal. 

So you moved into the cabin in Little Annie Basin on the backside of Aspen Mountain.
Several choices I’ve made have been pretty critical to who I am really. One was going to Alaska, one was moving up to Little Annie Basin. I had a friend up at my cabin and he saw the photos I took in Alaska and he’s like, “Dude, you should carve a totem pole for your cabin!” This was in the spring of 1989, back when Aspen still had true off seasons, and there wasn’t a lot of work to be found and I had time to do it. So me and one of my neighbors went off in the forest with a bow saw of all things and cut down this dead tree and I carved it and sold it for $3,000. 

To Bob and Nancy Magoon, prominent art collectors whose Starwood home gallery  included works by Warhol and Hirst. That commission led you to open a studio on Bleeker Street in Aspen, where you’ve been carving ever since. How many totem poles have you carved since then?  
Probably around 50. I use all hand tools. I tried carving with a chainsaw early on and it’s really easy to screw something up, not to mention, injure yourself as well. I just use a chainsaw to cut it to length, make a clean cut at the top and the bottom. And then it’s all hand tools. Something smaller that I can fit in the back of my truck will take about four months. Anything bigger that won’t fit in the back of my truck is going to take at least six months. There was a period of time where carving alone supported me, but once I got married and had a kid, it wasn’t enough. So I’ve been supplementing my art with a lot of other jobs, as a property manager, and for almost three years I’ve worked in construction.

In 2021, you were elected to Aspen’s city council. What prompted you to seek public office? Obviously not the $2,700 monthly stipend.
The longer version of the story is that my wife was working for the city at the time and she was in the planning and zoning department. And she came home from work one day and was kind of upset because SkiCo owned a piece of property at the base of the mountain that was zoned conservation and they wanted to put a hotel on it. That intrigued me and I started looking into it and I felt it was really unnecessary. It was called the Lift One Corridor Project.

You ran as an opponent of that project and got elected. You also were opposed to the Pandora’s/Hero’s expansion on Aspen Mountain.
I  skied over there a lot and as I said back then, we have 5,500 acres of skiable lift–served terrain already. The ski company is a green company, we’re in an environmental crisis, and we’re putting in more lifts. What is wrong with us? I opposed both of those things and actually they both happened anyway, which is kind of frustrating.

Yet you ran for another term in 2025 and were re-elected. What are the main challenges facing Aspen right now?
In the 40-plus years I’ve lived here, I’ve seen the population of the valley more than double and I’ve witnessed the loss of at least a month of winter. And there’s no reason to believe that both of those things won’t happen again, that we’ll see another doubling of the population and the loss of a month or more of winter. As the planet warms, our forests are drying out. Places like Ruidoso, New Mexico, burned. Jasper, Alberta burned. We’ve had three fires in the valley since I’ve lived here. Big ones. It’s silly to think it can’t happen here yet right now, our evacuation routes are constrained by a single two-lane bridge. So I want to prepare for that.

What’s your game plan?
Housing and transit are the biggest components of what we need to work on moving forward. I think we should be looking at these issues comprehensively, and I think we kind of are. We’re working on solving the conundrum of the entrance to Aspen and we also have approved plans to add 277 units of community housing at the Lumberyard. 

That’s in addition to 3,200 units of deed-restricted housing that already have been built in Aspen and Pitkin County. 
For a population of between 6,500 and 7,000 people that’s something to be proud of. That’s what’s kept the soul of this town alive, probably not fully intact, there’s been a down valley diaspora for sure but the heart and soul of the community is still here. I’m still super proud to call this place home.